I tracked Kings Dominion’s lines all summer. Here’s how to skip them

A friend recently asked me if I was a roller coaster enthusiast.

"Not really," I replied. "Why?"

"Because you just spent the last five minutes talking about your strategy for avoiding lines at Kings Dominion," they said.

Fair. I guess I do like roller coasters. (Though not in a way that makes me want to film myself riding them or spend any time researching manufacturers and track layouts.)

Maybe what I like more is feeling like I’m beating the system. And at this point, I’d like to think I’ve got Kings Dominion pretty much figured out.

The case for weekday evenings

I’ll cut to it. I have been methodically tracking wait times for Kings Dominion’s most popular rides all summer.

After crunching the numbers, I’m here to make the case for the weekday evening visit. It is the best way to breeze through the park, and maybe even to feel like you’re winning, if that’s possible in a place that charges $35 to park.

It may feel counterintuitive to buy a ticket on a day when you can only stay for a few hours. And by all means, if you can swing it, spend all day there. But if you work a nine-to-five and the best you can do is slip out an hour early, it’s still absolutely worth it.

That’s because on weekdays — and to be clear I’m talking Monday through Thursday; Friday is its own beast — the lines are five times shorter, and often nonexistent.

Average wait times across the park peak at just 13 minutes between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. By 5 p.m., the average wait has dropped to seven minutes. It just gets better from there. By your final hour in the park, between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., the average line is just three minutes.

In practice, those numbers mean you’re walking straight on to most rides. And over four hours, you will likely cover more ground than you could in an entire Saturday, when lines for some rides can climb as high as two hours.

A data scientist is born

I became a Kings Dominion season pass holder the same way I imagine many people do: On a whim after pricing out a single ticket and seeing that a season pass only cost $15 more after accounting for fees and parking.

The theme park won that round, but they wouldn't catch me with any more of their upsells. At least that's what I told myself until I found myself in the park on a Saturday (whoops), eating a $9 pretzel and feeling dismayed about a completely full queue for the only proper roller coaster my extremely adventurous 4-year-old son is tall enough to ride.

In a moment of weakness, I scanned a QR code on a sign advertising single-ride Fast Lane passes, which let you skip the line for one attraction. At $10 a rider, I held strong and passed. (Sorry, son, back to Planet Snoopy.)

But I was intrigued to see that QR code also led me to a page that showed live wait times for most of the park’s attractions.

Here, hiding in plain sight to drive sales and feed a pricing algorithm, was a source of truth in an opaque world of long, snaking lines. When I got home, I set about vibe coding the first and most important web application of my journalism career.

The resulting program, which took about three hours to build, lives on a webserver, where every five minutes, it visits the Kings Dominion Fast Lane site and logs the current wait times for each ride listed.

Secrets, revealed?

When I started this project, I thought I might uncover something like a secret, optimal route through the park.

Instead, my main takeaway is that the day of the week is the most important variable visitors can control.

Monday through Thursday are the best days on average, and, if you want to get super granular, Tuesdays and Wednesdays seem to be the absolute lightest, especially in the evening, which is what makes the post-work visit not only feasible, but arguably ideal.

After that Sunday is your best option, followed by Friday, then Saturday.

In terms of timing your day, crowd patterns follow roughly the same curve throughout the week. The day starts with a steady build through 1 p.m., when crowds peak until 3 p.m. and slowly taper off into the evening.

If you must go on a weekend, be at the gate the moment the park opens at 11 a.m. and consider taking a break in the middle of the day to eat lunch off-site. Then head back in the afternoon when crowds are lighter again.

From there, all the standard advice you might have heard is borne out by the data. When the park opens, skip the rides closest to the entrance (looking at you, Tumbili and Dominator), which see an early surge in queue times, and head straight to the back of the park, where rides like Flight of Fear and Twisted Timbers tend to see low waits for the first hour.

My biggest tip, though, is to keep an eye on wait times using the Fast Lane site while you’re at the park. Let the numbers guide you, especially in the afternoon and evening, when it’s common for crowds to surge at one coaster while another sits nearly empty.

There are also third-party sites that provide live updates using the same data stream, though unlike the Fast Lane site, they don’t always display when rides close due to maintenance issues — a real issue at Kings Dominion, where Pantherian and Flight of Fear, in particular, can spend a significant portion of each day closed for repairs.

Was it worth it?

In retrospect, maybe it shouldn’t have taken me a month and a half of data collection to conclude that going to the park on a weekday while most people are at work would mean shorter lines.

Then again, theme parks are inherently opaque. Kings Dominion isn't going to tell you that Saturday is a bad idea. They want the park full. They're the ones who built those winding corrals that hide just how long the line really is.

So maybe what the data offers is confidence in an alternative. Skip the Fast Lane pass. Say no to another upsell. And do it without risking an unsuspecting stroll into a two-hour line on a Saturday afternoon.

But, as they say, the house always wins. Enjoy your $9 pretzel.

Contact Reporter Ned Oliver at noliver@richmonder.org